The Idea of Progress eBook

But the outstanding fame of these great reactionaries
must not mislead us into exaggerating the reach of
this reaction. The spirit and tendencies of the
past century still persisted in the circles which
were most permanently influential. Many eminent
savants who had been imbued with the ideas of Condillac
and Helvetius, and had taken part in the Revolution
and survived it, were active under the Empire and
the restored Monarchy, still true to the spirit of
their masters, and commanding influence by the value
of their scientific work. M. Picavet’s
laborious researches into the activities of this school
of thinkers has helped us to understand the transition
from the age of Condorcet to the age of Comte.
The two central figures are Cabanis, the friend of
Condorcet, [Footnote: He has already claimed
our notice, above, p. 215.] and Destutt de Tracy.
M. Picavet has grouped around them, along with many
obscurer names, the great scientific men of the time,
like Laplace, Bichat, Lamarck, as all in the direct
line of eighteenth century thought. “Ideologists”
he calls them. [Footnote: Ideology is now sometimes
used to convey a criticism; for instance, to contrast
the methods of Lamarck with those of Darwin.] Ideology,
the science of ideas, was the word invented by de
Tracy to distinguish the investigation of thought in
accordance with the methods of Locke and Condillac
from old-fashioned metaphysics. The guiding
principle of the ideologists was to apply reason to
observed facts and eschew a priori deductions.
Thinkers of this school had an influential organ, the
Decade philosophique, of which J. B. Say the economist
was one of the founders in 1794. The Institut,
which had been established by the Convention, was
crowded with “ideologists,” and may be
said to have continued the work of the Encyclopaedia.
[Footnote: Picavet, op. cit. p. 69. The
members of the 2nd Class of the Institut, that of
moral and political science, were so predominantly
Ideological that the distrust of Napoleon was excited,
and he abolished it in 1803, distributing its members
among the other Classes.] These men had a firm faith
in the indefinite progress of knowledge, general enlightenment,
and “social reason.”

2.

Thus the ideas of the “sophists” of the
age of Voltaire were alive in the speculative world,
not withstanding political, religious, and philosophical
reaction. But their limitations were to be transcended,
and account taken of facts and aspects which their
philosophy had ignored or minimised. The value
of the reactionary movement lay in pressing these
facts and aspects on the attention, in reopening chambers
of the human spirit which the age of Voltaire had
locked and sealed.

The idea of Progress was particularly concerned in
the general change of attitude, intellectual and emotional,
towards the Middle Ages. A fresh interest in
the great age of the Church was a natural part of
the religious revival, but extended far beyond the
circle of ardent Catholics. It was a characteristic
feature, as every one knows, of the Romantic movement.
It did not affect only creative literature, it occupied
speculative thinkers and stimulated historians.
For Guizot, Michelet, and Auguste Comte, as well as
for Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, the Middle Ages
have a significance which Frenchmen of the previous
generation could hardly have comprehended.